Always know where your soldering iron is

The (really crappy) stock Apple power adapter for my old Powerbook G4 finally died. I had already been employing the constant twisting/fiddling method for a couple of months before it failed entirely. There was no way I was going to shell out $79 for another Apple power adapter and I also figured that given the symptoms there was a good chance that it was just a short in the poorly designed strain relief area near the jack… so I did what any person who has ever had the pleasure of inhaling the sweet fumes of lead solder would do and happily took a hammer to the damned thing. Using my limited toolset (a pair of scissors I found on the ground), I clipped and stripped the wires in preparation… then realized that I actually couldn’t find my soldering iron anywhere.

However, I did find some alligator clips. And fashioned a very temporary, extremely unsafe “fix” that got my Powerbook charging again! YAY!